sabotabby | Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Radicalized by Cory Doctorow. I was primed to like this one because I like everything he writes, and I was not disappointed. Radicalized is four novellas ripped from the BoingBoing headlines. Unauthorized Bread is about a refugee woman who hacks her DRM'd smart toaster (and lives in a building with poor doors), Model Minority is about a serial-numbers-filed-off Superman who discovers white supremacy and police brutality, Radicalized is about a message board community that goes to war with the health insurance industry, and Masque of the Red Death is about a rich douche who builds a bunker to wait out the apocalypse.

All of the stories are really good—witty, timely, and ultimately uplifting. As with most of Doctorow's writing, it's about the ideas more than the characters, who are thinly written but do what they need to do for the story to work. It's a pretty fast read and worthwhile. It's also funny to go to the Goodreads and see all of the butthurt reviewers who are OUTRAGED that this was nominated for Canada Reads and isn't even about Canada.

Currently reading: Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi. This is a beautifully written book about a little bookshop in Algiers, beginning in the French-occupied 1930s and flashing forward to the present, when the shop is about to be demolished. It's the story of Edmond Charlot and and Albert Camus, whose stories are interwoven with the fictional Ryad, hired to gut the shop and paint it, and Abdallah, a nearly illiterate elderly man who loves the shop. Against a backdrop of war, occupation, and imperialism, it's a lovely story about the role of literature in resistance and revolution. I'm really enjoying it so far.